Precious in God's Sight--November 1, 2023

Precious in God's Sight--November 1, 2023

"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones." [Psalm 116:15]

Even beyond death, God holds on to us.  Even when everyone still walking the earth forgets our name or our legacy, God remembers.  Even those lives swept away into oblivion as statistics and anonymous death counts after the latest hurricane... or mass shooting... or punitive bombing... are known, honored, and treasured by the One who has made us all.  All of that is because, as the psalmist puts it, "precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones."

This verse from the psalms has always sort of poked at me.  I guess it has seemed a bit odd to me, this idea of even our deaths being precious to God.  I suppose I might have expected something more like, "God prevents death for those who are faithful," or even, "Precious are the lives of God's faithful ones." But this recognition of the reality of death, especially to Easter people who believe in God's promise of resurrection, is striking.  The text doesn't quite say that God can't or won't prevent the death of God's faithful ones, but it does seem to take the fact of our death as a given--that we are mortal beings, and God loves us even in our mortality.  You even get the sense here that God grieves over our deaths, too--that it costs God something to love us, the same way loving anyone in this life comes at the price of sorrow at their death.  Maybe like Jesus weeping at the entrance of Lazarus' tomb, mere moments before he calls Lazarus back to life, God still grieves over any of our deaths, even though we also believe that God will raise us back to life and to new creation.

I think that's important to hold onto, because sometimes in our attempts to do Big Important Systematic Theologizing, Christians have talked about death only as a divine punishment for sin and made it sound like God gets some kind of satisfaction out of our death like it is the carrying out of justice for human sin.  And to be sure, there are certainly places in the Scriptures (often you'll hear it in Paul's letters, particularly Romans) where there is a connection made between primordial sin and death as a consequence for all of humanity (I'm thinking, for example, of Paul saying, "As sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned..." in Romans 5:12). But if we forget the tenderness and vulnerability of this line from the Psalms, we can end up seeing God simply as a divine sentencing judge, merely handing out fines and penalties for defendants' crimes who have been found guilty, impersonally following the guidelines for sentencing in some law book.  And that's not how the psalmist pictures God here.  Here God isn't some aloof Cosmic Judge meting out punishments and saying, "Justice is being done" when we die, but rather God is the One pierced to the heart when each of us gets to the end of our lives. God holds even our deaths precious, because God holds us as precious.

Today is the day in the church's life when we remember in particular the lives of those beloved ones who have gone to their rest, the Festival of All Saints.  And part of that remembrance is our trust that we're not the only ones who treasure those faces, names, and stories--but that God does, too.  On this day in particular, we are reminded that we are part of a vast and diverse family of people, not only of every country, ethnicity, language, and skin color, but also stretching through time from the distant past to the future we cannot yet see.  And we dare to believe that even though you and I may not have ever met most of those saints across time and space, none of them are forgotten or lost to God's memory.  Beyond that, all the countless small acts of kindness, the barely noticeable compassionate words spoken in a moment, and the unannounced minutes of presence alongside those who need a friend or an advocate, all of those are seen, honored, and treasured by the living God.  And when each of us breathes our last, even that breath is precious to God, because we ourselves are precious and beloved in God's sight.

In a time and place like ours that doesn't talk about death much at all, and that so often treats death as a matter of mere numbers, it is a countercultural thing to lift up the particulars of each individual life of those who have died.  And I suppose that means, too, that God is a party to that countercultural "good trouble" because of God's holding dear each life and story... because none of us is reducible to being a statistic or "collateral damage" in God's eyes. Not a one.

As we remember the lives of those we have loved, let us also remember that at our side is the living God, who holds each of them precious and of infinite worth.

Lord God, come along beside us and grieve with us, while we both honor those lives we have loved and lost to death, and also hold onto the hope you speak that none of your beloved are lost to you.